Time to shoutout my web host.
If you ever want to get serious about hosting some sites, then you will probably need your own hosting. Although you can still go with Blogger, TypePad or the many other hosted alternatives, nothing compares to the power and ability to customize settings as having your own hosting account. I run one dedicated server at Dedicated Now and a couple of sites at DreamHost. In the future when adding any more servers to the network they will all be done at DreamHost.
Why? Well it’s the fact that they make running a server and hosting a site very easy. Dedicated Now has a cheaper offering of dedicated servers, but administering them is not for the faint of heart since they are unmanaged. In any case most of you will not even wish to touch a dedicated server and just want simple site hosting.
DreamHost has one-click installs where you can install numerous software packages at the press of a button. For example, suppose you want to use WordPress, all you have to do is click the WordPress button and you instantly have a WordPress installation on your site. Too easy.
The control panel is easy to use and really does make you feel in control of your website without being intimidating. Nobody wants to have to fiddle around with website settings because that is time you could be using to make money or having fun writing great content.
Currently their lowest price plan ($7.95/mo) includes:
- 1 free domain registration
- 3 full domains
- 2400 MB diskspace
- 120 GB Transfer (more than enough for 99% of the webmasters out there)
- 600 mailboxes
Not bad. Again if you search around it is quite possible to find a cheaper alternative, but the overall experience will not be as fluid and enjoyable as the one offered by DreamHost. So if you ever wonder who I would recommend for webhosting, it would definitely be them. Even if I wasn’t getting paid for referring people to them I would still recommend them just like I recommend people use Macs over PCs.
If you do decide to go with them support please support FG by using our link.
A couple weeks ago they were running an offer where your first year of hosting was only 77 cents per month. I don’t know if the deal is still good, but I actually had like 8 people sign up using me as a referrer because of it.
Unfortunately, any time they use a deal like that you don’t get the normal $97 reward. If you have recurring rewards selected you do get like a dollar and will get 10% of their following years payments.
Oh yeah, just so you can check if the deal is still working enter the code “777″ at the last step during checkout.
It sure is a shame they don’t do PHP5 with those deals (unless I didn’t hunt hard enough).
Brian: The ’777′ code was working yesterday (Sunday May 29, 2005) when I signed up!
Mel: Dreamhost uses PHP4 by default. But you can enable PHP5 from Domains>Web in the Web Admin Panel. Click on ‘[Edit]‘ for the domain name where you want to activate PHP5 and you should see a check box which says something along the lines of ‘PHP Version 5? (*ONLY WORKS WITH PHP-CGI*)’. You know what that does! ;)
We signed up to use dreamhost for a new project (www.congamate.com) unfortunately they don’t support ruby on rails yet :- (
Just an update, they support Ruby on Rails now.
Well I found out that the code “777″ doesnt work anymore, but I did find a code that does. “WaveIt”, and it gives you $91.27 off on a years worth of hosting…
I had major downtime at one of my sites at DH recently. I could present them with some disturburbing statistics collected at host-tracker.com. I escalated this to then and had a response within an hour:
DH support responese —
I’m sorry for the problems that you’ve experienced with the server.
We’ve found a couple users on the server which are using more CPU than
they should. We’re working with them to help reduce their usage and to
restore stability to the server. There haven’t been any outages on the
server for over a week, so it sounds more like a load issue. If you don’t
notice uptime improvement in the next couple of days, please let us know
and we’ll be happy to investigate it further for you. Let us know if you
have any further questions.
–